Described as “the real Little Mermaid” and “poetic filth”, I had thought to see a dark, grungy and twisted Hans Christian Anderson homage. Instead, Tommy Bradson plies our emotions with the insecure, yet pleading and emphatic, musings of a sailor and his siren as they try to deal with life, sex and love.
And once you get your head around that, it is a twisted homage.
Pirate Rhapsody, Mermaid Requiem recounts the experiences of love of two people consumed by loneliness. Crude, debauched, and at times overwhelming, Bradson’s characters are a strange mix of fragility and disdain. They feel like they’ve been brought straight out of a time of pirates and sailors, and yet they understand the modern world better than most of us.
Haunting and desperate, Bradson’s songs are pure poetry. A mixture of bawdy cabaret and hypnotic revelation, he charges through the lives of his characters, leaving you struggling to catch up. His monologues – again, shameless smut coupled with the longing admissions of a broken soul – are sometimes too fast to follow, but the raw emotion lingers, to be understood on some deep, primal level in us all that we’d like to pretend doesn’t exist.
Bradson’s audience interaction proves his quick wit is not just because of strict rehearsal. His general insults and crude commentary are punchily delivered, but there were a couple of times where his more individualised humour went too far for my liking. Sexually crude and overwhelming in one instance, it makes an audience feel uneasy, wondering if they’re next, which can detract from the experience. To their credit, the affected audience members handled it beautifully, although two people up the back did walk out.
That being said, most of his interaction is brilliant, particularly his insistence as the mermaid that members of the audience spray him regularly with water to ensure he doesn’t dry out.
Entertaining, often hilarious and yet also deeply moving, Bradson delivers, in flawless character, a performance that’s poetically, lyrically scripted – even in its crudeness – and somehow manages to give us new views on love in a modern (and older) world. You just might want to sit up the back.
